Well, photo - I took a picture of what the smoke plume/cloud from the Station fire looks like, facing northeast from the front of my house.

Checking from the fire map and Google News links, I'm pleased to note that they DO update, so more info there. This may take awhile to deal with - it's been a long time since the area burned and it's very difficult terrain to work in.

They do that out here too, but it doesn't always help - in fact they've been known to get out of control and add to the problem. Of course we SHOULD have been doing them for the past few hundred years and not let this much burnable stuff build up: fires are a part of normal chaparral lifecycle.

At least in Southern California, the general geological layout is far more suited to earthquakes than volcanoes (though if you have the latter you get both, which strikes me as kinda unfair). I'm told the early California Indians had a legend of the world being a lot of mud on the backs of several turtles which liked to move around on occasion - sounds about right to me. :)